K wrote:Focus on brand economics killed DnD, and thats a lesson we should learn.
I think that's the takeaway, yes. If you ask yourself what the best use of your capitalization for immediate investment returns you're never going to come to the answer "hire fanboys right out of college who have a burning desire to write elf fanfics to make rules supplements and elf fanfics, some of which are going to be terrible." The "better" answer is always going to be "network with makers of phone apps or cheap plastic crap or something who are willing to license your brand logo to slap on things so they stand out on shelves (or virtual shelves, whatever)." And yet, if you always and forever choose the latter you don't have an RPG at all and you don't groom the next generation of writing talent so even if you ever suddenly realized that you needed to write an RPG you no longer have the skilled workers to make one.
It isn't just that WotC has spent the last 4 years not making content to make 5e in any way "complete," it's that they nowcan't. They don't have a template to make content into and don't have a writing staff that could write such a thing to order anyway. With no talent "in-house," when they finally realize that they need to write some actual D&D material they are going to have to shake down other companies to see what freelance RPG authors fall out.
And that method just doesn't have a great track record. I mean, you can get Steve Kenson, but you aren't getting his Shadowrun work, you aren't even getting his Blue Rose work, you're getting his fucking nMage work. The stuff where he just prattles on until he fills his allotted word count and then fucks off with his paycheck. The randos you poach to make an RPG aren't going to be on the same page as each other and will phone it in. At best you're going to get an RPG that is extremely bloated with text. But you might literally end up like Scion and not even have a core game mechanic or something equally disastrous. The people in charge don't know what the end product is supposed to look like on the micro-level so the chances of getting incomplete or unworkable drafts foisted off into the final product is extremely high.
Something like that. The big problem right now is that I feel pretty strongly that the elf fanfic written by randos at the local gaming store has a better than even chance of being superior to Curse of Strahd or Rage of Demons. The premier adventures have never been all that great, and I don't think there's been anything people would think of as a premier adventure since... Red Hand of Doom? Yeah, I think it's literally been 12 years since someone wrote a D&D adventure that was above replacement level. I think Pathfinder has had a few in the intervening years, but for fuck's sake people who were playing Red Hand of Doom in highschool are now old enough to have kids who are old enough to play Red Hand of Doom.K wrote:Frankly, any new DnD-killer needs to be written by an anti-capitalist. Content creation needs to be given back to the people through an open and clear set of rules that they can use to build adventures, settings, and game components like abilities and classes and monsters.
Ideally, the owners of D&D would have some sort of system to get higher quality fan productions pushed to the forefront. Like perhaps a magazine, where random fans would send in contributions every month and every month you'd publish slightly cleaned up versions of the better submissions alongside commissioned art. You know, like Dragon Fucking Magazine was in the 80s and 90s. Better yet, you could do that as a web presence, where you produced glossy and edited content every fucking day because you had tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people sending you submissions.
I don't think this sort of thing is incompatible with making money in a capitalist fashion. They have shit like this for Magic the Gathering, and that makes crazy stacks of money. But a constant effort needs to be in place to farm writing talent and get creative output to your fans. Without that, you have nothing.
-Username17
